Architecture schools are applying innovative educational models that foster new ways of thinking and challenge the role of the profession. Photo courtesy UCLA Architecture and Urban Design Thom Mayne and graduate students visit an artists’ collective in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, as part of a yearlong studio course at the university’s Now Institute. Toyo Ito’s Tokyo office hosted students in 2012, who worked on tsunami relief projects. Related Links:America's Top Architecture Schools 2014Interview with James P. Cramer View the 2012 Rankings View the 2011 Rankings View the 2010 Rankings Architecture School isn't what it used to be. While core fundamentals, including tectonics
Never Built: Los Angeles at the A+D Architecture and Design Museum revives a century of ambitious schemes that might have been. B+UDowney Office Building, 2009 A history of what didn’t happen can sometimes be even more revealing and thought provoking than what did. That curious inversion of circumstance fuels Never Built: Los Angeles, a show at the A+D Architecture and Design Museum focused on more than a century of ambitious designs, some right on the brink of realization—that never broke ground in the city. Alongside visionaries who have vanished into obscurity, the thwarted include such famous names as Neutra, Lautner,
A Temple to Good Taste: A design team embraces a building's Colonial roots while infusing the restaurant inside with a new flavor of tempered minimalism.
If A carpaccio of octopus, tender and razor thin, with notes of mellow olive oil, tangy citrus, and smoky piment'n, could be translated into restaurant design, you might end up with the Workshop Kitchen + Bar in Palm Springs, California.
Running through July 7 at SCI-Arc's downtown Los Angeles space, the show—part of the Getty-sponsored Pacific Standard Time series—highlights the pivotal role of the temporary gallery that Thom Mayne ran out of his home for a few weeks in the late 70s. Zago Architecture, the exhibition designers, wrapped the entry zone in skewed, blown-up reproductions of Morphosis' mock postage stamps – a clever riff on Graphic Wrap, one of the six spatial strategies the curators identified in the featured work, most notably Eric Owen Moss' Fun House. In the fall of 1979, Los Angeles’ first gallery for architecture came into
By Edwin Heathcote. London: Frances Lincoln, 2012, 160 pages, $20. This book is so petite and whimsical-looking you could easily mistake it for “bookshop candy”—those cutesy, little tomes perched around cash registers—but don’t be fooled. While this rambling meditation on the significance of home mixes plenty of wit and surprising factoids with occasional clichés, it also draws on such heavy-hitting intellectuals as Ludwig Wittgenstein, Walter Benjamin, Carl Jung, Ingmar Bergman, and Gaston Bachelard. The Meaning of Home grew from a series of essays its author, British journalist Edwin Heathcote, wrote as the Financial Times’ architecture critic, a position he has
The beachfront city of Santa Monica, California, with its stylishly laid-back restaurants and hotels, plus freeway access to downtown Los Angeles, may not seem the obvious place for affordable housing.
The 28th Street YMCA opened in Los Angeles in 1926 on an upbeat: the Spanish Colonial Revival building offered the African-American community a sparkling recreational facility with an indoor pool and affordable accommodations for young men who were migrating from other regions (and prevented by color barriers from staying at ordinary hotels).
As schools for students with autism move from makeshift or retrofitted quarters to new buildings tailored to their specific programs, architects and educators focus on what makes the best places for learning.
Back in 1975, when the Eden Institute was founded in a New Jersey church basement to serve children with autism, the disorder was considered relatively rare, then estimated at a nationwide rate of 1 in 10,000 births.